Ta-Nehisi has a fun thread up right now with his 8 most influential books. His thread got me thinking about some of the books that had the greatest impact on me. I am a bone fide book lover. When I was a kid it was my best escape from a miserable reality and I devoured everything from Dante to Dr. Seuss. I don’t discriminate either, I’ll read just about anything from bubble gum romances to comic books to Sherlock Holmes. One exception, I don’t re-read any John Steinbeck. IMO, he is the single most overrated American author who preferred to peddle in unnecessary and cheap shock tragedies in order to mask the fact that he wasn’t very talented.
Maybe I’ll share some of my favorites passages from time to time.
If I had to pick just one book, or character that was most influential to me as a child it has to be “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Tom Sawyer is the single greatest hustler every written into a book. There is one passage in particular that is single-handedly responsible for me learning to sell at such a young age. In fact, this is exactly what I do for a living. I convince people to paint my fence every single day.
From Chapter 2:
“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.”
